And yet bear on, I pray. I am…what I am (rather, what I find to my own dismay I am become; I was not always so…): old schoolmarm rendered fatuous by loneliness, indignified by stillborn dreams, I prate like a “coed” on her first “date”—and this to a man not merely my junior, but… No matter.

I will be brief! I will be frank! Mr B.: but for the opening paragraphs of your recentest, which lies before me, I know your writings only at second hand, a lacuna in my own life story which the present happy circumstance gives occasion for me to amend. Take no offence at this remissness: for one thing, I came to your country, as did your novels to mine, not very long since, and neither visitor sojourns heart-on-sleeve. A late good friend of mine (himself a Nobel laureate in literature) once declared to me, when I asked him why he would not read his contemporaries—

But Germaine, Germaine, this is not germane! as my ancestor and namesake Mme de Staël must often have cried to herself. I can do no better than to rebegin with one of her own (or was it Pascal’s?) charming openers: “Forgive me this too long letter; I had not time to write a short.” And you yourself — so I infer from the heft of your oeuvre, stacked here upon my “early American” writing desk, to which, straight upon the close of this postscript, I will address me, commencing with your earliest and never ceasing till I shall have overtaken as it were the present point of your pen — you yourself are not, of contemporary authors, the most sparing…

To business! Cher Monsieur (is it French or German-Swiss, your name? From the lieutenant who led against the Bastille in Great-great-great-great-great-grand-mère’s day, or the late theologian of our own? Either way, sir, we are half-countrymen, for all you came to light in Maryland’s Dorset and I in England’s: may this hors d’oeuvre keep your appetite for the entrée whilst I make short work of soup and salad!)…

Salad of laurels, sir! Sibyl-greens, Daphne’s death-leaves, honorific if worn lightly, fatal if swallowed! I seriously pray you will take it, this “highest honour that Marshyhope can bestow”; I pray you will not take it seriously! O this sink, this slough, this Eastern Shore of Maryland, this marshy County Dorchester — whence, to be sure, you sprang, mallow from the marsh, as inter faeces etc. we are born all. Do please forgive — whom? How should you have heard of me, who have not read you and yet nominated you for the M.U. Litt.D.? I have exposed myself already; then let me introduce me: Germaine Pitt I, née Gordon, Lady Amherst, late of that other Dorset (I mean Hardy’s) and sweeter Cambridge, now “Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English” (to my ear, the only resident speaker of that tongue) and Acting (!) Provost of Make-Believe University’s Factory of Letters, as another late friend of mine might have put it: a university not so much pretentious as pretending, a toadstool blown overnight from this ordurous swamp to broadcast doctorates like spores, before the stationer can amend our letterhead!

I shall not tire you with the procession of misfortunes which, since the end of the Second War, has fetched me from the ancestral seats of the Gordons and the Amhersts — where three hundred years ago is reckoned as but the day before yesterday, and the 17th-Century Earls of Dorset are gossipped of as if still living — to this misnamed shire (try to explain, to your stout “down-countian,” that — chester < castra = camp, and that thus Dorchester, etymologically as well as by historical precedent, ought to name the seat rather than the county! As well try to teach Miss Sneak my secretary why Mr and Dr need no stops after), which sets about the celebration this July of its tercentenary as if 1669 were classical antiquity. Nor shall I with my passage from the friendship — more than friendship! — of several of the greatest novelists of our century, to the supervisal of their desecration in Modern Novel 101–102: a decline the sadder for its parallelling that of the genre itself; perhaps (God forfend) of Literature as a whole; perhaps even (the prospect blears in the eyes of these…yes…colonials!) of the precious Word. These adversities I bear with what courage I can draw from the example of my favourite forebear, who, harassed by Napoleon, abused by her lovers, ill-served by friends who owed their fortunes to her good offices, nevertheless maintained to the end that animation, generosity of spirit, and brilliance of wit which make her letters my solace and inspiration. But in the matter of the honorary doctorate and my — blind — insistence upon your nomination therefor, I shall speak to you with a candour which, between a Master of Arts and their lifelong Mistress, I must trust not to miscarry; for I cannot imagine your regarding a distinction so wretched on the face of it otherwise than with amused contempt, and yet upon your decision to accept or decline ride matters of some (and, it may be, more than local) consequence.

Briefly, briefly. The tiny history of “Redneck Tech” has been a seven-year battle between the most conservative elements in the state — principally local, for, as you know, Mason and Dixon’s line may be said to run north and south in Maryland, up Chesapeake Bay, and the Eastern Shore is more Southern than Virginia — and the most “liberal” (mainly not native, as the natives do not fail to remark), who in higher latitudes would be adjudged cautious moderates at best. The original college was endowed by a local philanthropist, now deceased: an excellent gentleman whose fortune, marvellous to tell, derived from pickles… and whose politics were so Tory that, going quite crackers in his final years, the dear fellow fancied himself to be, not Napoleon, but George III, still fighting the American Revolution as his “saner” neighbours still refight your Civil War. His Majesty’s board of trustees was composed exclusively of his relatives, friends, and business associates — several of whom, however, were of more progressive tendencies, and sufficiently influential in this Border State to have some effect on the affairs of the institution even after it joined the state university complex. Indeed, it was they who pressed most vigorously, against much opposition, to bring the college under state administration in the first place, hoping thereby to rescue it from parochial reaction; and the president of the college during these first stages of its history was a man of respectable academic credentials and reasonably liberal opinions, their appointee: the historian Joseph Morgan.

To console the Tories, however, one John Schott — formerly head of a nearby teachers college and a locally famous right-winger — was appointed provost of the Faculty of Letters and vice-president of (what now was awkwardly denominated) Marshyhope State University College. A power struggle ensued at once, for Dr Schott is as politically ambitious as he is ideologically conservative, and had readily accepted what might seem a less prestigious post because he foresaw, correctly, that MSUC was destined for gigantic expansion, and he sensed, again correctly, opportunity in the local resentment against its “liberal” administration.

In the years thereafter, every forward-looking proposal of President Morgan’s, from extending visitation privileges in the residence halls to defending a professor’s right to lecture upon the history of revolution, was opposed not only by conservative faculty and directors of the Tidewater Foundation (as the original college’s board of trustees renamed itself) but by the regional press, state legislators, and county officials, all of whom cited Schott in support of their position. The wonder is that Morgan survived for even a few semesters in the face of such harassment, especially when his critics found their Sweet Singer in the person of one A. B. Cook VI, self-styled Laureate of Maryland, of whom alas more later — I daresay you know of that formidable charlatan and his mind-abrading doggerel, e.g.: